airbazar wrote:FlyHappy wrote:airbazar wrote:Not just long haul. My last trip was on UA, flying BOS-DEN I decided to use the lav and it had a puddle of urine on the floor.
People in this country in general are just not very conscious about cleanliness in public toilets, be it on a plane, a restaurant, or a school.
You just don't see that kind of filth in other parts of the World. In Europe for example there are self cleaning public toilets. I don't think I've ever seen such a thing in this country,
c'mon now.
we all agree it'd be nice if US carriers could perform a little better in this area, but lets not get carried away.
The "other parts of the Word" are not fundamentally cleaner or more conscientious about public hygiene... crowds of people are the same everywhere. If you have not seen "filth" elsewhere, then I can safely conclude that you are restricting yourself to some very nice and sheltered parts of the world.
Aircraft cleanliness is obviously about management and labor, and what emphasis the carrier puts on this aspect of its product. Its hardly a statement about societies cleanliness at large.
Obviously there are other parts of the world that are a lot worse but among the Industrialized world, what we typically call the "1st world", the U.S. society is the least conscious about cleanliness in my experience. Try visiting a supermarket or restaurant kitchen next time you're in Germany or Japan. Heck, just look at their homes even in poor neighborhoods you don't see piles of trash in the front yard. And Austrian board of health inspector would close half of the restaurants in the U.S.
When you go to a restaurant here, the first thing that happens is someone wipes your table with a filthy brown rag that has been re-used 100 times and left to stew in germs all day long. We make kids go to school in filthy schools every day and they become desensitized to it and grow up thinking that's normal. In some European and Asian schools they make everyone take their shoes off at school and typically don't wear shoes in the house. Not here in the U.S. It's a cultural thing. Cleanliness is not a strong characteristic of US society so it's not surprising that our FA's don't feel the need to maintain the toilets clean.
That's a fine diatribe
But what you originally said was "You just don't see that kind of filth in other parts of the World", without any references to 1st or industrialized world, which represents a pretty small fraction of the world.
And still, there's little reason to believe there is direct correlation between societal cleanliness and the practices of Airline carriers. I really don't want to cite specific countries or cultures, because this is a public, global forum, and that can only incite argument and hard feelings; but just taking posts from this at face value, you'd see that that there plenty of carriers cited as having "spotless lavs" that originate from societies not thought of as particularly "clean" by your stated 1st world standards (putting aside the reality that much of the worlds airlines are not from the "1st world").
I'm not trying to debate what countries are "clean" or "unclean", because that's not what is in dispute, nor is it germane.
I'm saying that you've over-complicated your cause-effect theory as to why US aircraft lavs are (sometimes) substandard, and introduced a fair bit of unrelated trivia.